Drone Deployment Delivers Dubiously Determined Death

                In class on March 7, our class had Kathy Kelly as a guest speaker on the war in Afghanistan, her efforts relating to refuge work and the use of drone technology by the US. Her discussion focused on people’s efforts to move past war, the unreliability of drones in war, and some exploration of why the US is at war.

                The discussion of drone technology, and its use in Afghanistan, was quite informative to me as I had very little clue beforehand the extent to which drones are being utilized. Given that we apparently have drone surveillance of most of the country and its neighbors, I’m left confused on what it is that our country is fighting for given that if there was a clear idea of who represents a threat our country should be able to locate them with this level of resource investment, and if who is a threat is unclear then having surveillance from the sky doesn’t seem to be a very reliable method for identifying new threats.

                While it’s easy to criticize the unreliability of drones in light of significant collateral damage and civilian casualties, it is important to consider what they are usually being used instead of. Historically speaking, bombs have been frequently used by the US as a means to cause significant damage to our enemies with low risk to our troops and relatively little use of resources. The use of bombs is quite possibly the largest cause of civilian death in our countries history and to my knowledge has been largely replaced by drones as a slightly more selective and notably more precise tool for delivering the horrors of war. In light of this, I’d say drones are a step forward that is currently not as bad as what was used before, and has room for significant improvement in regards to reducing collateral damage.

                During Kathy’s real-life examples of the scenarios where drones have killed civilians, I took particular interest in the one that featured statements from the people who made the call to fire upon a caravan. While there were people supporting the possibility that the targets of interest were not threats, they were in the minority and ultimately I think nobody in the discussion wanted to go home and have to explain why they left several American soldiers without cover fire. What I saw and discussed with Kathy after the lecture was the lack of a nonlethal means for the pilot to interact with targets of interest. Kathy expressed an interest in the possibility but stated she didn’t know whether people where researching nonlethal tools for military drones. My own research on the matter has indicated it would be very easy to apply nonlethal weapons to drones and that people are interested in using this with local law enforcement drones if we ever use them. But I was unable to find any discussion of applying nonlethal weapons to drones used around civilian areas in Afghanistan.

                                Her discussion on the war highlighted several of the moral ambiguities and purposes of our military effort.  From a humanitarian perspective, the political pretenses of restoring the peace shake under the fact or how much we are subsidizing the Taliban in order to supply our troops in Afghanistan. Why our military started paying the Taliban, I still don’t know, but having deployed the army, the US government has too much vested interest to withdraw so for the foreseeable future our government will probably continue to pay to use roads in Taliban territory.  Her discussion on American interest in profiting off of the oil in Afghanistan was concerning, but without further information I can’t judge how much economics influenced our decision to start this war.

                Overall the unclear enemy and morality of our military effort leaves me reminded of the Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War “Troops were sent on search and destroy missions and often it was difficult to tell enemy from civilian.” (John Green on The Cold War in Asia) while in Afghanistan, similar efforts without a clear army to defeat have been unfolding. While seek and destroy missions in war are not uncommon, the lack of a victory in sight and stated confusion in identifying enemies leaves me further concerned about our continued involvement in Afghanistan.

                The discussion itself was quite enjoyable to me, and while I failed to take advantage of her built in question time, I liked that she had it. Overall I enjoyed her presentment of new facts and how, while she was definitely against the war, she wasn’t trying to vilify any countries but rather explore their actions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2IcmLkuhG0 (John Green)